Trigger warning: The following article has references to suicide. Please avoid reading if you feel distressed by the subject.
To reach the Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad, (IIT-H) from a village close to Odisha’s Mahanadi river, in Subarnapur district, D. Subarna (name changed to protect identity), 23, travelled by bus, train, and a cab. When she finally arrived on July 26, at the 576-acre campus, where she was enrolled in IIT-H for the M.Tech programme, the weather was not very different from what she had left behind: it was warm and cloudy.
The landscape though, would have been a stark contrast, from the green fields that her parents cultivated as farmers, to IIT-H’s multi-storeyed angular grey building, a testimony to the institution’s focus on “inventions and innovations”. The 60-metre-tall residential towers of IIT-H come into view from 6 kilometres away, on the Sangareddy Highway.
